The next video announcement went out with the morning news at six, seven and eight a.m., and again on the news at noon, six and eleven p.m. It opened with a view of Megamind, seated behind the mayoral desk, which now held almost no loot. Instead, it was crowded with blueprints and notes, although the spiked nameplate remained.

"This is the Evil Overlord speaking to you from City Hall on the subject of citizenship. As I'm sure many of you are aware, my best friend and right-hand man, known as Minion," - the camera zoomed out and a little to the right to show Minion standing next to Megamind's chair; the henchfish gave the audience a smile and a brief wave - "is not a man, in fact is not human at all, and therefore has been denied citizenship despite his very obvious sentience, intelligence and capability, not to mention his many admirable qualities of personality such as loyalty and hard work. It is therefore my will that he shall henceforth be a citizen, with all the perks and privileges attached to that stay-tus. You, the rest of the citizens, will be expected to treat him with respect, not merely because of his special relationship with me, but because it is inherently his due. When the clerks come back to work tomorrow morning, and I expect all city employees to be back at work, they will produce the necessary documents. Congratulations, Minion." Megamind reached toward Minion, and the two shook hands. "Got anything to say to your fellow citizens?"

" I never thought I'd even be, like, a person in human society, and now I'm a citizen. Can I tell the rest, sir?"

"By all means."

"Anybody out there who's like me, who's intelligent and sentient but can't be a citizen of the place they live because they're not physically like a human, that's not true here. Come and talk to us."

"Yes," said the blue man. "All individuals, no matter what their bodily form, who can convince us of their intelligence, sentience and at least some potential value to the city will be eligible for citizenship, will be introduced to the public via broadcast and may possibly find employment in my service. The rest of you, the great majority who have citizenship through the accident of inheritance, will be expected to treat these new citizens approopriately. That is all. Carry on with your lives."

Even while it broadcast, brainbots were sent out with new posters with pictures of Minion and summaries of the announcement printed on them. They pasted these new posters up over the top of any "No You Can't" posters close enough to ground level that the text could be read from the sidewalk. The Overlord was determined to inform even those citizens who never paid attention to broadcasts.

###

About two that afternoon, a stout woman of mixed race with dyed brown hair in the sort of short, tightly permed style typical of Midwestern, middle aged, middle class women strode toward City Hall as if she expected to enter. When a brainbot blocked her way with a menacing snap of its metal jaws, she stood her ground and addressed it calmly.

"This message is for Minion," she said. "My name is Delia Athelstein. I'm one of those city employees that Megamind ordered back to work tomorrow morning and I just want to make sure the office space here will be ready when everyone arrives. If there are any arrangements that need to be made ahead of time, my cell phone number is 734-588-3349. Thank you for your attention." Returning to her car, she was confident that she'd hear from Minion promptly.

Mrs. Athelstein (she had never adopted the modern 'Ms.') had been administrative director to three mayoral administrations and the real most powerful person in city government for the last two of them. A major part of her power lay in her willingness to do things like this, to go in ahead of time and make sure that things were ready and that glitches were limited to the sort that furthered her agenda. She had appealed to Minion because she had him figured for her opposite number in the Overlord's power structure, the one who actually figured out how to wield the power that his boss, like most politicians, had acquired by accident in the course of his striving for glory. Minion heard her message, did a little research and called his boss.

"Sir, did you know that there are a hundred and twenty-nine city employees who work in this building, and they're going to be showing up here tomorrow expecting to get to their desks?"

"What? Why didn't you tell me this before?"

"I only just realized it now, sir. One of them came by early, about fifteen minutes ago, and left a message. Sir, what are we going to do?"

"Hmm. We don't want them in City Hall. They'll be in our way. And we don't want to just send them home after we've ordered them back to work. Ergo, we've got to find space for them somewhere else."

"We've got three buildings out on the peninsula that we could empty out. They're kind of raw, but there's more than enough room. If we get the brainbots working on it tonight, we can probably have everything ready."

"Excellent. What would I do without you, Minion?"

The fish called Mrs. Athelstein back and the two met for an hour and a half in the second floor conference room, hammering out the details of interior layout, computer networking, employee parking, and the dozens of other details involved in moving a large office. Minion thoroughly enjoyed himself. He and Megamind had seldom collaborated with other villains, so the experience of working with colleagues was a rare one for him. Mrs. Athelstein didn't seem at all put off by his appearance, so she struck him as a rarely unprejudiced human. (In fact, she had prepared by watching all the footage of Minion she could find in order to reduce her discomfort with his appearance to an undetectable minimum.) She even joked with him a little. ("How do you like your first bureaucratic headache?") By the end, he was feeling almost like he had made a friend, or at least an associate he could feel comfortable with.

As for Mrs. Athelstein, she came away relieved that, while the Evil Overlord himself seemed to be an absolute loon, his second-in-command seemed like a solid, sensible person that she could work with. She had a hundred and twenty-eight phone calls to make and she looked forward to the end of her month-long involuntary vacation. She made a remark in the course of the meeting that was to have repercussions. "I always thought overlords lived in palaces. By now I expected that you'd have either built one or taken over Scott Mansion."

###

Three days later, another video went out, of Minion introducing the first successful out-of-town applicant for citizenship under the non-sentients edict: an African Grey Parrot who gave his name as Stanley Nakayama. This bird told the camera his life story: he had been captive-bred and adopted at an early age by Charlene Nakayama at the time of her retirement as a professor at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Stanley was quite happy with Charlene, whom he called "the best human mom a bird could have," but when the professor died, her relatives sold Stanley back to the same parrot breeder he'd come from. This breeder put him in an aviary in which he was the only parrot who was conversant, the technical term for a bird who could converse with humans instead of just imitating them. He found that he was uninterested in non-conversant females and generally lonely and bored. Also, Charlene had supplied him with specially designed bird suits, like women's halter-top one-piece bathing suits but with a hole for his tail and hooks instead of elastic at the waist. He had come to prefer wearing the clothes and the breeder had taken them away. (He appeared on camera in a bird suit Minion had made from his description.) He had heard about the offer of citizenship on a radio broadcast that an aviary worker was listening to and had escaped that same day, flying the rest of that day and all the next, sleeping on heating grates in La Crosse and Milwaukee (where he got a friendly reception from the homeless humans) and taking the ferry across the lake. In Metro City he hoped to find employment as a document courier. "I might not be able to carry as much as a human on a bike, but I'm faster because I can fly above traffic."

Stanley's story was picked up by the wire services and broadcast all over the world. At the time, the largest population of conversant parrots north of the Rio Grande was a group of thirty-seven at a research center near Austin, Texas. The night after his story went out, the avian inmates staged a mass escape. Authorities tried to round them up, but the runaway flock was abetted by sympathetic humans. Thirty-five reached Metro City after a dramatic 1,250-mile flight that fascinated the public for weeks. The Evil Overlord released a public statement of welcome to the flock, adding that he was gleeful over the chaos and disruption caused by his offer of citizenship to non-humanoid sentients and hoped for more of the same. Individual birds continued to arrive more quietly, and in two cases humans moved to Metro City in order that their parrots could apply for citizenship. The same thing was happening, on a smaller scale, with talking members of other species, and a few who didn't talk, such as a runaway circus elephant who communicated by writing. Megamind interviewed and approved dogs, cats, various domestic hoofed animals and a few primates. Minion designed a Non-Human Citizens' page for the website with a classified section to help them find work, housing and other necessities. For the first time, the fish found himself the center of an active social circle, a community in which he was looked up to, his advice frequently asked and his company sought after. He began to secretly hope that Roxanne would begin to return Megamind's affections; the boss always demanded less of Minion's time when he had a girlfriend.

###

Metro City Gallery Transformed

by Alan Carpenter

Special to the Detroit Free Press Arts Section

When I first heard that the Evil Overlord of Metro City was redesiging the interior of the Metro City Gallery of Art and adding a portico of his own design, I was expecting something appropriate to the stage set for a heavy metal concert. Instead, I am forced to conclude that Metro City's ruler actually knows something about architecture, particularly the Art Deco style of the last century.

The new portico takes some of its stylistic elements from the Neoclassical Gallery building to which it is attached, then adds moderne elements and ornamentation based on ancient Egyptian decor. All these elements are widely used in Art Deco. The designer's infamous personal emblem is nowhere to be seen and there isn't a spike or a scrap of leather anywhere. The only self-reference he has made is in the choice of colors: black enamel, blue glass and stainless steel, all of which are also well within the Art Deco tradition.

The new portico is functional as well. One of the few flaws of the Gallery as originally built is the lack of any protection from the elements until one is inside the building. Popular shows were sometimes less well-attended than they might be simply because people got tired of waiting outside in bad weather. Gallery management estimates that forty-eight people could wait in line under the new portico.

The really radical change is to the inside of the building. Megamind has tossed aside the centuries-old traditional approach to gallery layout and started over. Instead of the wide, airy, high-ceilinged and marble-floored space of the old gallery, with most works displayed in groups and most backgrounds white, one finds oneself in a maze created out of theatrical blackout curtains, with black carpet on the floor and a matte black ceiling only nine feet overhead, crowded with lighting equipment, microphones and camera lenses, their cases colored to match so that they don't call attention to themselves. (Gallery staff is invisible, but a medical emergency or act of vandalism would be immediately noticed.) The carpet muffles footsteps and the curtains absorb the voices of other visitors.

At the end of each leg of the maze is a single work of art, the only thing in sight that is really well-lit. The design of the maze makes it impossible to see more than two works from any one position and the lines of sight for those two are, in most instances, at ninety degree angles from each other. This has the effect of focusing the viewer's attention on one work at a time, undistracted by others displayed in the vicinity. The viewer seems to be alone with the work. If any element of the new design is copied elsewhere, this will be it.

There are exceptions, such as the Salon du Princesse, which is unchanged and which opens out of the side of a passageway, as before. Certain of the most popular works are displayed in wider spaces, with a pair of benches arranged like theater seats in front of each. In contrast, there are a few that are displayed through small window openings, often from quite a short distance, so that one is confronted by the work rather abruptly. I must admit that I never truly felt the startling character of Caravaggio's "Medusa" until I suddenly encountered it, barely more than an arm's length away, through one of those openings. It demonstrates that thought has been given to the most effective display of each work.

Elevators are scattered through the maze. The height of the main hall is thirty-five feet from the floor to the base of the skylight. Scaffolding has made three stories out of it, which makes up for the enormous amount of wall space lavished on each work. All those works which were on permanent exhibit before the current regime are once again on permanent exhibit, including those which the Evil Overlord had previously removed and which most of us in the art world did not expect to see again during his lifetime. Instead, he has made the Metro City Gallery of Art into his personal display space and then invited the rest of us into it.

The last upward-bound elevator lifts the viewer into the skylight itself, a half-cylinder of glass ten feet in height and twenty in width. Stepping out of the elevator, one walks the eighty feet of its length with a distinct sense of being directly under the sky. At the end of the walk, in a kind of small amphitheater with two rows of stepped-down seating, is a single work: Van Gogh's "Starry Night". The elevator behind it returns visitors to the lobby. The choice of this relatively recent masterwork as the culmination of the gallery experience, over some of the great Renaissance paintings also in this collection, is hardly the most radical in this very radical presentation, but it seems deeply fitting. The setting reinforces both the character of the painting itself and the context of its presentation: Metro City's connection to the universe beyond Earth. Gallery hours: 3pm to midnight, Tuesday through Saturday.

###

The report began with a shot of Roxanne and a red-faced man with a salt-and-pepper mustache. Both wore hard hats. The man wore a coverall and held a clipboard. They were outdoors. Behind them, about ten feet away, was a grey concrete wall with a heavy steel door in it. "This is Roxanne Ritchi reporting from Metro City Power's main generating plant, where Megamind is preparing to bring a new power source online: the orbiting superweapon known as the Death Ray. With me is Josh Longran, head engineer at the plant, and the Evil Overlord is around here somewhere." She glanced around.

"Inside the blast wall, last I saw of him," said Longran, gesturing behind him.

"This is a blast wall?" Roxanne asked, gesturing behind them.

"Yes, ma'am. We all saw the enormous explosion that resulted the one time the Death Ray was used, so even though its power is going to be stepped down a few orders of magnitude, I lobbied for this blast wall, just to -"

He was interrupted by the door banging open behind them. Megamind appeared, framed in daylight, showing that the door led from outdoors to outdoors.

"Ah, Ms. Ritchi, you're here. Come, come." He turned, his cape swirling behind him, and went back the way he'd come. The camera followed him through the door, then stopped a few feet beyond it and panned upward over a satellite dish that could have covered a city block.

"Wow," said Roxanne, out of sight. The camera swung around to her. "So this dish is supposed to catch the beam of the Death Ray instead of being destroyed by it?"

Megamind stepped suddenly in front of her so that his face took up the entire image. He was looking straight into the lens. "Yes! Yes! And convert it to electricity, which will then be transmitted through those cables." He vanished from the picture. "See the cables? The camera focused on two heavy black cables, thicker than the Evil Overlord's thighs, following them from the base of the dish along the concrete surface and out through the wall. "Now follow!" The camera followed him back out the door and to the right, around the curve of the wall until it came to a row of low blocky shapes like sheds without doors, all linked to the cables emerging from the wall. "The cables feed these battery arrays. Once we've got them filling up properly, then we'll start feeding the power into the grid at times of high demand." The camera panned upward, following the wires that rose from the battery arrays and joined horizontal wires stretching away to the plant's main generator building. Then it came back to Roxanne, Megamind and Longran. "Over the next few months, as we work out the bugs, we'll be depending more and more on the Death Ray, less and less on those turbines and things in there." He gestured in the direction of the generator building.

"So how is this going to affect the life of the city?" asked Roxanne.

"Well, to begin with, I'm declaring a no-fly zone for half a mile around the plant in all directions. Not going to worry about enforcement much, since anything flying into the beam will be instantly destroyed. The importance of the zone is that, during the initial testing phase, the beam won't be constantly on, and we want aircraft to stay out of the way even when it's off. There might be brief outages when we're switching over, but the summer brownouts should be fewer and shorter than in previous years."

"So it'll all balance out. Mr. Longran. How does this method of power generation compare with the conventional methods of power generation that Metro City Power uses now?"

"Well, once it's up and running, it'll have a lot fewer maintenance headaches. There are almost no moving parts involved." Megamind bounced on his heels as Longran spoke, clearly impatient to have the camera and Roxanne's attention returned to him.

"And are you confident that it can meet the city's electricity needs?"

"Oh, yes, ma'am. From the specs I've seen about the power this thing puts out, we'll have more than enough."

"But we'll never completely cease to use the conventional power generation equipment," the blue man interjected. "The Death Ray is still, first and foremost, a weapon, and I don't want to have to plunge the city into blackout when I need to use it in battle. So after it's up and running, we'll be switching back to conventional power for a little while a couple of times a month. Ideally the staff here will get so good at it that the switch will be smooth and quick and hardly noticeable, and Minion or I can retarget at will."

"Which brings me to our last question. Why? What's in it for the Evil Overlord?"

"Well, Ms. Ritchi, when a villain's base of operations is known, it needs to be pretty self-sufficient. Otherwise the forces of good can bring it down simply by interdicting supplies. I am the first villain to have an entire city as my base since the development of electrical power, and I will not be thwarted by shipping clerks."

Roxanne turned back to the camera. "There you have it, ladies and gentlemen. This is Roxanne Ritchi, reporting for Channel Eight News."

###

Madison Stivik became a Megahead when she was thirteen. She was a bright, gawky, socially inept, somewhat hyperactive nerd, friendless and frequently picked on; Megamind's brilliance and rebelliousness spoke to something inside her. Using money saved up from her allowance, she bought the domain name , and started a fan site. Monitoring an online community turned out to be one of her gifts.

Over the next ten years, her site became the most important center of Megahead activity on the web. At the same time, Madison grew up, married one of her fellow nerds, started a software business with her new husband and his equally nerdy brother, and had a baby. When Megamind became Evil Overlord, many Megaheads fell away, either because he didn't immediately move on to grander schemes or because a rebel who defeats the Establishment is no longer a rebel, but is instead the new Establishment and so no longer appeals to the inner rebel in the fan. But Madison's loyalty never wavered. Actually meeting her idol in the flesh was something she longed for, but from a distance. She often fantasized about such a meeting, but never dared do anything to make it happen.

Then one day it happened to her. Her son was at preschool. Her husband and brother-in-law were upstairs in the little cluster of rooms that was their company headquarters. She was out in the back yard, grubbing out the thistle plants that kept coming back no matter what she did. Suddenly she heard a bowg and when she looked up, there was a brainbot hovering a few feet away. It handed her a pale blue card with Megamind's emblem and oversized, spiky writing on it.

"The Evil Overlord would like to speak with you," she read. "Please follow the brainbot." As soon as she looked up, the little bot moved away, toward the street. As she and it came around the corner of the house, a car blinked into visibility at the curb. The Car. She caught her breath. Until she saw The Car, this could, just barely, have been a prank by some of her fellow fans, but its presence meant Megamind was really in there and she was about to meet him. And she was in gardening clothes with dirt on her knees. If she had been just a little older, or if someone from her adult life had been there with her, she'd have shrugged and said to herself Oh, well, so much for presentation, but at that moment, alone with the brainbot, she felt thirteen again. She quivered with the equal urges to run squeeing to the car and to flee into the house. For a moment the urges cancelled out and left her pinned in place, but when she stopped the brainbot did, too, and looked back at her with its camera lens eye.

She made her legs work. By the time she reached the sidewalk and saw the car's rear door open and the brainbot motion her in, her scurrying mind had fixed on the fact that her idol was in a position of authority now, and the possibility that she was in trouble.

"Ms. Stivik. I am very pleased to meet you," the blue alien said as she slid in.

"Megamind, oh God, I, um, if this is about something somebody said on the site, I'm sorry. I don't really -"

"Oh, no, no. It's nothing about the content. I am entirely in favor of a diverse, shall we say permissive approach to monitoring, although truthfully I lurk very little. It's Minion who really keeps an eye on the fandom." The Evil Overlord gestured toward the driver's seat.

Minion turned around in his tank. "Hi, Ms. Stivik," he said with a friendly smile. She began to relax almost without realizing it. If Minion was smiling like that, she couldn't really be in trouble, could she?

"No, what we want to talk to you about is the name."

"Oh. Yeah, I heard you were going to start an official site."

"Yes, and it will be megamind dot gov, but how many people just type in dot com from reflex? At the same time, we appreciate our fandom and don't want to disrupt its activities. So what I propose is that our front page, whether approached via dot com or dot gov, will have a large button in the upper right-hand corner that will take people through to your site. It will give you a kind of quasi-official stay-tus and, of course, hosting will be free of charge from now on."

"That sounds awesome."

"Then all we need is your signature." Minion passed a clipboard full of papers over the seatback. She spent a couple of minutes reading and signing. Megamind pulled out copies for her and thanked her. She had one request.

"Could you, like, stay here until my husband and my brother-in-law look out the window? 'Cause they'll never believe this otherwise."

"Certainly. Very nice meeting you, Ms. Stivik." She went inside. A minute later, two male faces appeared at an upstairs window. Minion waited until they both had expressions of goggle-eyed astonishment before he engaged the stealth mode.